With digital media and other data usage growing, the amount of memory required for storage is increasing. A good example of this is media related items, such as songs and videos. These items are often stored and accessed by a user on a mobile device for “on-the-go” access. Even with compression technologies, a user's media library can easily be in the tens of gigabytes. Media collections will only become larger over time as video and other data services become more prevalent. In this regard, software applications, such as Apple® iTunes® for example, have been created to store and manage the user's media library. These software applications are typically executed on the user's personal computer or a server under the user's account, wherein the user's entire media collection is stored persistently on an associated hard drive, either resident on the computer or server's internal data bus or provided via a networked hard drive (e.g. a NAS device).
The user executes the media software application to download the desired media items from their media library to their mobile device. An example of such a portable mobile device is the Apple® iPOD® media player. Because users expect their mobile devices to be adapted to store all or a significant portion of their media collection for mobile usage, media players, including the Apple® iPOD®, provide gigabytes of memory storage. Some models are presently adapted to store as much as 30 gigabytes of data. However, because of the size and packaging restraints of mobile devices, per unit memory costs are higher than those associated with a typical hard drive, thereby adding significant costs to mobile devices. Further, as users' typical data collection needs increase in size, manufacturers of mobile devices are under marketing pressure to increase the memory capacity of the mobile device, thus continuing to increase costs. Even with advanced memory technologies, which promise ever increasing memory storage capacity, users' demand for “on the go” data will always outstrip the memory capacity that is economically feasible to install on mobile devices.
To address this problem, mobile devices can be provided with remote communication capabilities to remotely access the user's data via the mobile device. However, data latency issues exist with this scheme. Further, if the network is not accessible, such as the mobile device being located outside a wireless network coverage area, the user would not be able to access their data.
Consequently, memory management schemes and methods for mobile devices is and will continue to become important, especially as the typical size of the user's data collections increase and overtake memory capacities of mobile devices. It will be important for a user to not only be able to access any of their user data collection on a mobile device with minimum latency issues, but also to perceive the complete contents of their data collection. Without this perception, the user may not be aware that certain data not resident on the mobile device is available from their data collection for access and/or usage.